The Polish Officer (17 page)

Mildred Green did not lose her temper, staunch amid the hammering and banging, fits of artistic temperament and huge bills courteously presented for no known service or product. She had worked in France since 1937, she knew what to expect, how to deal with it, and how to maintain her own equilibrium in the process—some of the time, anyhow. She knew, for example, that all laborers stopped work around ten in the morning for
casse-croûte,
a piece of bread and some red wine to keep them going until lunchtime.

Thus she was surprised, sitting at her typewriter, when a man carrying a toolbox and wearing
bleu de travail
knocked at the door and asked if he could work on the wiring in her ceiling. She said yes, but had no intention of leaving the office—fearing not so much for the codebooks as for the typewriters. The electrician made a grand show of it, tapped on the wall with a screwdriver handle, then moved to her desk and handed her an envelope. Inside she could feel the outline of a key.

“I’m not an electrician,” the man said in French. “I’m a Polish army officer and I need to get this letter to the Polish government-in-exile in London.”

Mildred Green did not react, simply tapped a corner of the envelope thoughtfully against her desk. She knew that the French counterespionage services were aggressive, and fully versed in the uses of
agents provocateurs.
“I’m not sure I can help you,” she said in correct, one-word-at-a-time French.

“Please,” he said. “Please help me. Help
us.
”

She took a breath, let it out, face without expression. “Can’t promise you a thing, sir. I will speak to somebody, a decision will be made. If this isn’t right, in the garbage it goes. That’s the best I can do for you.”

“Read it,” he said. “It just says that they should contact me, and tells them how to go about it, through a safe-deposit box in Orléans. It can’t hurt you to give that information to the Poles in London. On the other hand if you give it to the French I’m probably finished.”

Mildred Green had a mean Texas eye, which now bored into the false electrician in
bleu de travail.
This was, perhaps, monkey business, but likely not. What the Pole didn’t know was that when she returned home that night, the hotel desk would have a fistful of messages for her, all of them delivered quietly. From Jews, intellectuals, all sorts of people on the run from Hitler. A few left names, others left instructions—for ads in personal columns, for notes hidden in abandoned workshops, for contact through third parties. Every single one of them was urgent, sometimes desperate. Europe had festered for a long time, now the wound was open and running, and suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the neighborhood wanted her to clean the damn thing up.

“We’ll just have to see,” she said. “Can’t promise anything.” She said that for whatever little ears might be listening. Her real response was to slide the envelope into her big leather shoulder bag—a gesture her lost Pole immediately understood. He inclined his head to thank her—almost a bow—then saluted. Then vanished.

The nights of July were especially soft that Paris summer. All cars, taxis, and buses had been requisitioned by the Germans, and with curfew at 11:00 P.M., windows masked by blackout curtains, and the streetlamps painted over, the city glowed a deep, luminous blue, like Hollywood moonlight, while the steps of a lone policeman echoed for blocks in the empty streets. Nightingales returned and sang in the shrubbery, and the nighttime breeze carried great clouds of scent from the flowers in the parks. Paris, like a princess in a folk tale, found itself ancient, enchanted, and chained.

Hidden away on a side street in the seventh arrondissement—the richest, and most aloof, of all Parisian neighborhoods—the Brasserie Heininger was an oasis of life on these silent evenings. Started by competing beer breweries at the turn of the century, the brasseries of Paris had never abandoned their fin-de-siècle glitter. At Heininger, a white marble staircase climbed to a room of red-plush banquettes, mirrors trimmed in gold, painted cupids, and lamps lowered to a soft glow. Waiters with muttonchop whiskers ran across the carpet carrying silver trays of langouste with mayonnaise, sausage grilled black, and whole poached salmon in golden aspic. The brasserie spirit was refined madness; you opened your heart, you laughed and shouted and told your best secrets—tonight was the last night on earth and here was the best place to spend it.

And if the Heininger cuisine was rich and aromatic, the history of the place was even more so. In 1937, as storm clouds gathered over Europe, the Bulgarian headwaiter Omaraeff had been shot to death in the ladies’ room by an NKVD assassin while two accomplices raked the mirrored walls with tommy-gun fire. A single mirror had survived the evening, its one bullet hole a monument, the table beneath it—number fourteen, seating ten—becoming almost immediately the favored venue of the restaurant’s preferred clientele. Lady Angela Hope, later exposed in
Le Matin
as an operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, was said to have recruited the agent known as
Curate
—a Russian foreign correspondent—at that table. Ginger Pudakis, wife of the Chicago meat baron, had made it her evening headquarters, with Winnie and Dicky Beale, the American stove-pipe millionaires, the Polish Countess K——— and her deerhound, and the mysterious LaReine Haric-Overt. Fum, the beloved clown of the Cirque Dujardin was often seen there, with the tenor Mario Thoeni, the impresario Adelstein, and the dissolute British captain-of-the-night Roddy Fitz-ware. What times were had at table fourteen! Astonishing revelations, brilliant seductions, lost fortunes, found pleasures.

Then war came. And from the fourth of June to the twenty-eighth of June, the great brasserie slumbered in darkness behind its locked shutters.

But such a place could not die any more than the city of Paris could; it had come alive again, and table fourteen once again took center stage at its nightly theater. Some of the regulars returned; Mario Thoeni was often there—though his friend Adelstein had not been seen lately—Count Iava still came by, as did Kiko Bettendorf, the race-car driver and Olympic fencer for Germany, now serving in the local administration.

Kiko’s stylish friends, on arriving in Paris from Hamburg or Munich, had made the Brasserie Heininger a second home. On this particular summer night, Freddi Schoen was there, just turned twenty-eight, wearing a handsomely tailored naval officer’s uniform that set off his angular frame and pretty hazel eyes. Next to him sat his cousin, Traudl von Behr, quite scarlet with excitement, and her close friend, the Wehrmacht staff officer Paul Jünger. They had been joined at table fourteen by the White Russian general Vassily Fedin, who’d given the Red Army such a bad time outside Odessa in 1919; the general’s longtime fellow-émigré, the world-wandering poet Boris Lezhev; and the lovely Genya Beilis, of the Parthenon Press publishing family. Completing the party were M. Pertot—whose Boucheries Pertot provided beef to all German installations in the Lower Normandy region—tonight accompanied by his beautiful niece; and the Baron Baillot de Coutry, whose company provided cement for German construction projects along the northern coasts of France and Belgium; tonight accompanied by his beautiful niece.

Just after midnight—the Brasserie Heininger was untroubled by the curfew, the occupation authorities had quickly seen to that—Freddi Schoen tapped a crystal vase with his knife, and held a glass of Pétrus up to the light. “A toast,” he said. “A toast.”

The group took a moment to subside—not everybody spoke quite the same language, but enough people spoke enough of them—French, German, English—so that everybody more or less understood, with occasional help from a neighbor, most of what was going on. In this milieu one soon learned that a vague smile was appropriate to more than ninety percent of what went on in the world.

“To this night,” Freddi said, turning the glass back and forth in front of the light. “To these times.” There was more, everybody waited. M. Pertot, all silver hair and pink skin, smiled encouragement. “To,” Freddi said. The niece of Baron Baillot de Coutry blinked twice.

“Wine and friendship?” the poet Lezhev offered.

Freddi Schoen stared at him a moment. This was
his
toast. But then, Lezhev was a man of words. “Yes,” Freddi said, just the bare edge of a sulk in his voice. “Wine and friendship.”

“Hear, hear,” said M. Pertot, raising his glass in approval. “One must drink to such a wine.” He paused, then said, “And friendship. Well, these days, that means something.”

Freddi Schoen smiled. That’s what he’d been getting at—unities, harmonies.

“One Europe,” General Fedin said. “We’ve had too many wars, too much squabbling. We must go forward together.” He had a hard face, the bones sharply evident beneath the skin, and smoked a cigarette in an ivory holder clenched between his teeth.

Jünger excused himself from the table, M. Pertot spoke confidentially to his niece, the waiter poured wine in Mademoiselle Beilis’s glass.

“Is that what you meant, Herr Lezhev?” Freddi said quietly.

“Yes. We’ll have one Europe now, with strong leadership. And strength is the only thing we Europeans understand.”

Freddi Schoen nodded agreement. He was fairly drunk, and seemed preoccupied with some interior dialogue. “I envy you your craft,” he said after a moment.

“Mine?” Lezhev’s smile was tart.

“Yes, yours. It is difficult,” Freddi said.

“It cannot be ‘easy’ to be a naval officer, Lieutenant Schoen.”

“Pfft.” Freddi Schoen laughed to himself. “Sign a paper, give an order. The petty officers, clerks, you know, tell me what to do. It can be technical. But people like yourself, who can see a thing, and can make it come alive.” He shook his head.

Lezhev squinted one eye. “You write, Lieutenant.” A good-humored accusation.

A pink flush spread along Freddi Schoen’s jawline, and he shook his head.

“No? Then what?”

“I, ah, put some things on canvas.”

“You paint.”

“I try, sometimes . . .”

“Portraits? Nudes?”

“Country scenes.”

“Now that
is
difficult.”

“I try to take the countryside, and to express an emotion. To feel what emotion it has, and to bring that out. The melancholy of autumn. In spring, abandon.”

Lezhev smiled, and nodded as though confirming something to himself
—now this fellow makes sense, all night I wondered, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“Here is . . . guess who!” The wild shout came from Lieutenant Jünger, who had returned to the table with a tall, striking Frenchwoman in captivity. She was a redhead, fortyish, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth, carmine lipstick, and a pair of enormous breasts corseted to sharp points in a black silk evening dress. Jünger held her tightly above the elbow.

“Please forgive the intrusion,” she said.

“Tell them!” Jünger shouted. “You must!” He was a small-boned man with narrow shoulders and tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Very drunk and sweaty and pale at the moment, and swaying back and forth.

“My name is Fifi,” she said. “My baptismal name is Françoise, but Fifi I am called.”

Jünger doubled over and howled with laughter. Pertot and Baillot de Coutry and the two nieces wore the taut smiles of people who just know the punchline of the joke will be hilarious when it comes.

Freddi Schoen said, “Paul?” but Jünger gasped for breath and, shaking the woman by jerking on her elbow, managed to whisper, “Say what you do! Say what you do!”

Her smile was now perhaps just a degree forced. “I work in the cloakroom—take the customers’ coats and hats.”

“The hatcheck girl! Fifi the French hatcheck girl!” Jünger whooped with laughter and grabbed at the table to steady himself; the cloth began to slide but Pertot—the cheerful, expectant smile on his face remaining absolutely fixed in place—shot out a hand and grabbed the bottle of Pétrus. A balloon glass of melon balls in kirsch tumbled off the edge of the table and several waiters came rushing over to clean up.

“Bad Paul, bad Paul.” Traudl von Behr’s eyes glowed with admiration. She had square shoulders and straw hair and very white skin that had turned even redder at Lieutenant Jünger’s performance. “Well, sit
down,
” she said to the tall Frenchwoman. “You must tell us all about those hats, and how you check them.”

Jünger shrieked with laughter. The corner of Fifi’s mouth trembled and a man with gray hair materialized at her side and led her away. “A problem in the cloakroom!” he called back over his shoulder, joining the mood just enough to make good their escape.

“Those two! They were like that in school,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “We all were.” He smiled with amused recollection. “Such a sweet madness,” he added. “Such a special time. Do you know the University of Göttingen?”

“I don’t,” Lezhev said.

“If only I had your gift—it is not like other places, and the students are not like other students. Their world has,” he thought a moment, “a glow!” he said triumphantly.

Lezhev understood. Freddi Schoen could see that he did. Strange to find such sympathy in a Russian, usually blunt and thick-skinned. A pea hit him in the temple. He covered his eyes with his hand—what could you
do
with such friends? He glanced over to see Traudl von Behr using a page torn from the
carte des vins,
rolled up into a blowpipe. She was bombarding a couple at another table, who pretended not to notice.

“It’s hopeless,” Freddi Schoen said to Lezhev. “But I would like to continue this conversation some other time.”

“This week, perhaps?”

Freddi Schoen started to answer, then Jünger yelled his name so he shrugged and nodded yes and turned to see what his friend wanted.

Lezhev excused himself and went to the palatial men’s room, all sage-colored marble and polished brass fixtures. He stared at his face in the mirror and took a deep breath. He seemed to be ten thousand miles away from everything. From one of the stalls came the voice of General Fedin, a rough-edged voice speaking Russian. “We’re alone?”

“Yes.”